Cornell Chronicle Article Cites Benefits of OpenSTV

Cornell University (my alma mater times two) recently used OpenSTV to count the votes for its election of the student member of its Board of Trustees. Cornell previously used an outside vendor to collect and count the votes. Now, Cornell uses its own system to collect the votes and uses OpenSTV to do the counting.

The Cornell Chronicle posted an article about the election and touting the benefits of OpenSTV:

Fiscal responsibility also played a role in how the election was administered. For the first time, the Office of the Assemblies conducted the election and counted votes in-house, rather than contracting out those tasks as it has for the past decade, said Ari Epstein, the office's assistant director. It tabulated votes using open-source software, OpenSTV, developed by Jeff O'Neill '92, J.D. '05, during his first year at Cornell Law School.

The move saved the office about $18,000, Epstein said. "And each ballot is available in a simple text file format so any member of the community who doubts our tabulation has the ability to do it themselves with their own software." The office ran the Employee Assembly elections online with the software, and plans to do the same with the Faculty Assembly elections as well, eliminating the waste and cost of paper ballots, Epstein said.